More widget news - Yahoo Widgets 4 launched; What is your choice?
By Vivek | March 22nd, 2007 at 01:20 pm ET
Early morning today Yahoo today went live with the Yahoo! Widgets 4. As you might expect from Yahoo, the new widget engine comes with new set of cool graphic effects. Just to touch on the new features briefly - you get a New Widget Dock, better performance/reduced memory consumption, improved authoring tools for developers, and automatic updates. Flickr fans have something to celebrate about with the launch of new Flickr widget that streams photos from Flickr right to your desktop, and also the drag-and-drop upload which allows you to do highly customized batch uploads without having to open a browser.
With this release it gets even more difficult choice for users to choose from all the competing widget offerings that span from web to desktop - Yahoo Widgets/My Yahoo, Google Desktop/Personalized Page/Google Apps Start Page, Yourminis Web/Yourminis Desktop, Mac Dashboard, Vista Sidebar/Live, Netvibes, Pageflakes, Webwag, Protopage, Springwidgets, and Teqlo. Not a week goes by without a significant news from one from one of them. As blogger and as well as a user I find it hard to define which option is good for me or to recommend to developers and users.
One thing that can make this decision easier is by determining which of these providers delivers or plans to deliver widgets that interact with our daily tools. I don’t want the cutie clocks and gauges that end up being a botheration. Also given the number of resources these apps consume I want something more in return. To deliver such high end widgets each of the platform has to attract just the right kind of developer community and startups to partner with. This in turn means they need to build the leading platform that delivers on promises to developers and gives max ROI on their development effort. One very basic requirement can influence the developer decision easily - work on a widget platform that lets widgets work and sync right from the web to desktop. Lets see who delivers on this need 100%. Actually none. Yourminis, Google Desktop/Web do work on both the places but without the widget sync. Rest of them? Only exception to this rule is Teqlo that goes way beyond what most of the existing services are offering. Anyway these are my thoughts. Take the poll below and let me know whom you choose.
on March 23rd, 2007 at 4:51 am
Vote Protopage!
on March 23rd, 2007 at 2:38 pm
I am just waiting for the release of “Son of Widget” and the sequel to “Widget Goes Surfing”. I love gadgets as much as the next guy, but I feel like I am in a really bad 1960’s Japanese horror film lately. If I have to choose (can I pick from the Godziira scary fun pac?) I would pick Yahoo because I started there and will probably end there! Can we call them something else at least? Maybe Gii’s or something!
Always, Phil
on March 27th, 2007 at 4:24 am
[…] As for taking your music beyond MediaMaster you can use the widget code that gives you option to play songs from your music library anywhere. You can even customize the player to function in Radio mode, or play your recently added and recently played songs. Web widget aside, I would love to get a desktop widget for Yourminis, or Yahoo, or Google Desktop. […]
on April 13th, 2007 at 12:40 pm
Where have all the votes gone?
on April 13th, 2007 at 7:36 pm
dunnoo
on April 30th, 2007 at 11:01 pm
[…] Appirio has similar widgets available for Yahoo Widget engine. […]